Al Young's "Snakes" offers some alternative to hopelessness…. MC is a young man on the verge of a vocation. This gives his life purpose; it palliates the terrors and disjunctures of the ghetto; it restores his adolescence to a semblance of normal adolescent joy and hope…. [It] is clear from the beginning that MC's escape from the ghetto, if he makes it, will be made against tremendous odds, and that for every MC who surfaces there are dozens of talents that never do. For most of its inhabitants, MC's Detroit is as secure a prison as Francie's Harlem [depicted in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn].

Though very brief—it's really less a novel than a novella—"Snakes" should make Al Young's reputation as a writer. It is well written. Its characters … are vividly realized and individuated; their speech rhythms are authentic and distinct from one another...